While Joe poured two shots of bourbon from his flask into a cheap plastic cup, he tried to check his email only to discover that the motel — and possibly all of Medicine Wheel — had no Internet access.
He called Marybeth on his cell and they talked for twenty minutes. Marybeth had heard nothing from Sheridan, either, and was frustrated that the computers were down at the library most of the day and she’d not found out anything on Erik Young. April was still sulking in her room, and Lucy was at play practice. Rojo had a mysterious patch of hair missing from his forehead that must have come from scraping it against the corral door.
Joe told her about the pheasants, meeting Jim Latta, and the Whispering Pines Motel.
He said, “It’s really… cute.”
“Would I like it?”
“Probably not,” he said, leaning back and looking around his room. The prints — old C. M. Russells — on the walls were decades old and faded.
Then he asked her to look up a couple of names and another item the next day when she went to the library, provided the network was back up.
“The names Bill Critchfield and Gene Smith,” Joe said. “I checked dispatch and they have no priors, but I’m wondering what else is out there. And see if you can find out what it costs to perform major scoliosis surgery.”
He felt guilty for even asking.
“That’s an interesting list,” she said. Then: “Joe, you’re keeping your distance, right? Like you promised?”
“Of course.”
Although he was exhausted, he couldn’t sleep. The first night in a strange place was always a long one. When the heater kicked on to ward off the chill, it moaned to life and ticked furiously. When it was off, the silence outside was awesome, filled only with a slight breeze through the branches of the pines.
Twice he heard the crunch of gravel from tires on the road outside. When headlights swept through the thin curtains of his cabin, he sat up straight in bed. He’d brought several of his weapons into the room with him before locking his pickup, and he felt for where he’d propped his 12-gauge Remington Wingmaster in the corner near his bed. It was loaded with double-ought buckshot. But whoever had driven into the motel alcove had turned around and left, as if doing a drive-through.
He wondered if it was simply a wrong turn or if someone was checking out where he was staying.
Then he thought about what it must be like to wake up to find the cabin burning up around him, and he got dressed.
It was one in the morning when Joe located the isolated logging road in the hills below Wedell. He made the turn into the dark timber and saw fresh tire tracks in the mud in the ruts ahead of him. Sleet sliced down through his headlights, and he switched them off in favor of his under-the-bumper sneak lights as he drove up the hill he had taken that afternoon with Jim Latta.
When he got to the top of the meadow, his precautions turned out to be largely unnecessary, because below in the trees there was a slaughter going on.
He stayed in the cab of the pickup but lowered the side windows. Down near the tree line was a hastily parked pickup with an empty trailer behind it. Inside the trees were the percussive blasts of shotguns and high whines from ATVs roaring around. Periodically, he saw the flash of headlights through the trunks as a four-wheeler spun around, and the red spouts from the muzzles of the guns. Once he saw the inverted teardrop shape of a rooster pheasant shoot out of the trees, only to explode into feathers and bounce along the grass like a kicked football. It landed near the parked truck.
There were shouts: “Got you, you motherfucker! Ha!”
The only bouts of silence were when they had to reload.
Joe pulled out his cell phone and called Jim Latta’s home number. It went straight to voicemail.
“Jim, Joe. I’m up here where we released those birds this afternoon and there’s a firefight going on. I’m pretty sure I see Bill Critchfield’s truck on the lower part of the meadow and I can hear four-wheelers racing around and plenty of gunshots. I figure these guys want to poach out all those pheasants while they’re still bunched up.”
He paused. Then: “This is your district and I don’t want to bigfoot, but I hate guys who do things like this. I’ll wait here until two. Call me back if you want to hook up and make an arrest. Otherwise, I’ll head back to town.”
A few minutes later, he left the same message on Latta’s cell, then called in his location and situation to dispatch. The reception was scratchy, and he wasn’t sure the night dispatcher understood him, but at least they’d have something to go on if he disappeared off the face of the earth.
The shotgun blasts continued.
Finally, Joe grabbed his shotgun, told Daisy to stay, and got out of his pickup. He wished his request for a night-vision lens for his digital camera had been approved, but he’d been told at the time that an employee with his record of equipment wreckage couldn’t be trusted with $7,000 surveillance hardware.
So he used the camera on his cell phone. He snapped photos of the pickup — it was the F-250 that had been outside the Bronco Bar — as well as the license plate, the boxes of shotgun shells inside the cab, and the muddy tracks of the ATVs from the pickup to the trees. Joe leaned over and got a good photo of the mangled pheasant that had dropped in the meadow after being shot from inside the trees. The coloring on the ring-necked rooster was vibrant in the flash: gold, vermilion, beaded with droplets from the sleet.
Before he left, he placed one of his business cards under the windshield wiper of the pickup so they’d know he’d been there. Then he trudged back up the hill. While he did, he looked over his shoulder to make sure the four-wheelers hadn’t emerged from the timber to chase him down.
Inside the cab, Joe reached over and patted Daisy on the head and said, “Yup, it’s a whole different world here.”
11
The next morning, high above the ranch headquarters on a timbered south-facing slope, before the visitor arrived, Nate Romanowski straddled the peak of the roof of a hundred-year-old line shack and fitted a new six-inch inner-galvanized pipe into the top of an ancient rock chimney. A ladder was propped against the eave, and his weapon hung within reach from the top of the right leg of the ladder.
The sky had cleared from the snow and rain the night before, but the air still smelled of wet spruce and damp forest floor. From his vantage point on the roof, Nate could see dozens of miles in every direction — soft wooded hills stretching south and west to the plains, and east to the border of South Dakota. The lone distant conical spire of Devils Tower shimmered in the morning sun to the northwest.
The headquarters for Sand Creek Ranch was a mile away and a thousand feet lower in elevation than the line shack. The collection of buildings stretched along the contours of the creek itself on the valley floor. The compound comprised twenty or so buildings, including guest cabins, barns and sheds, corrals for horses, and the magnificent castle-like lodge itself. On mornings when the air pressure was low like it was now, a pall of woodsmoke hung above the headquarters until the temperature warmed enough to release it into the atmosphere. But the compound itself, with all its people and intrigue, was far enough away that Nate often was able to forget it was there.
The first thing he’d built on the grounds of the old log shack was a sturdy mews for his falcons inside a loafing shed once used by cowhands. The birds perched with hoods on their heads and jesses hanging from their talons — a redtail, a prairie, and his peregrine that had somehow found him in the Black Hills and returned more than a year after she’d flown away. He was surprised to see her because returning falcons were extremely rare in his experience and in the falconry literature, but there she was. Their reunion had been unsentimental — she simply cruised down from a thermal air current from the west and roosted on the roof of the line shack. When he recognized the raptor by the mottled pattern of her breast feathers and raised his forearm, she floated down and landed on it clumsily, talons biting into his sleeve for balance.